"Bova, Ben - Voyagers 03 - Star Brothers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

--and found himself sitting in his own office chair, behind his imposing, immaculately gleaming desk.











CHAPTER 2





"HYPNOTISM!" snapped Joao de Sagres. Stoner made a wintry smile. "Something like that." De Sagres glared at his visitor as he peeled off his sopping, stained silk suit jacket and pulled his once-immaculate tie loose from his shirt collar. His hands still trembled, even though he was safely back in his spacious office. Through the long windows he could see the reassuring gleaming towers of Brasilia.

I am the president of the most powerful nation of Latin America, he told himself. And this man before me is a nobody. But he avoided Stoner's eyes.

He felt better, although his mind was still in turmoil. He was a smallish man, with a high forehead and round face that would have been bland except for the luxuriant black mustache and his probing dark brown eyes. This office was his sanctuary, where he could sit on his elevated platform and look down on the supplicants and schemers who came to beg favors from him.

"You tricked me," he accused.

"Not really," Stoner replied. "I showed you something very important."

"A band of savages in the Mato Grosso," de Sagres sneered.

Stoner, sitting in the leather armchair in front of the president's imposing desk, replied, "They are men. And they are in New Guinea, not the Mato Grosso."

"New Guinea! Impossible One moment we are here in my office, and then suddenly ten thousand kilometers away? And then back here again? It was a trick! Admit it!"

"I wanted to show you that even so-called primitive men have ways of preventing war. Those elders, they are called 'the Great Souls' by their people. They talked the warriors out of fighting."

De Sagres reached toward the intercom.

But Stoner suggested mildly, "Don't you think you could make your own drink?"

He pulled his hand back as if scalded. For a moment he simply sat in his high-backed swivel chair, looking troubled, undecided, almost frightened. Then he rose and walked shakily across the thick carpeting to the mirrored cabinet that served as a bar.

"If you have some Jamaican dry ginger ale," said Stoner, "I'll have it with brandy. On ice."

By the time de Sagres mixed the drinks and returned to his desk he had pulled himself together somewhat. His hands barely trembled, the ice in the glasses clinked hardly at all.

"You somehow talked your way into my private office, past

all my staff and security. Why? Merely to show me a conjuring trick?"